[Farwalker]

With the pending release of Windows Vista Home Premium and its ability to address 4GB of ram in 32 bit mode and 16GB of ram in 64 bit mode, as well as Windows Vista Business which will address 4GB in 32 bit and 128GB in 64 bit; the question arises as to how much memory is optimum to use in a mother board that only has 4 memory slots.

For the sake of this discussion I am assuming that drivers are available to run the most popular applications and games in 64 bit mode and that people will be running in 64 bit mode and are able to address 16GB of ram or more under Vista.

Several factors affect what is optimum:
1) Cost
2) speed of ram,
3) compatibility of ram
4) capacity of ram

Will there be 2GB or 4GB ddr2 sticks that will work if all 4 memory slots are filled?
Will they overclock to any meaningful extent?

Are you better off with 4x1GB sticks that OC to 500fsb+; or better off with 4x2GB stick that only run at 333fsb? Assuming that 4GB memory sticks are released soon; are you better off with 4x4GB sticks running at 333fsb?

I know that the advantages of a greater amount and speed of memory is dependent upon the application. Disregarding that reality and for the sake of discusssion and those ever popular benchmarks such as 3Dmark06 and Everest I'd like the readers and respondents to consider the above issues.

I assume that the memory manufactures will move to meet the perceived demand that should arise when Vista releases and purchasers start looking to populate their motherboards with more than 4GB of ram.

So with those two assumptions about the unknowable future . . . . what do you think?

[squads]

as of right now I think 2gig sticks are prohibitively expensive at this point. 4gigs of memory should pretty much be able to handle anything at this point and might even be considered overkill...although vista is a memory hog so 4gigs might soon be the standard.

[Shell]

I have 2Gb of RAM and Vista never consumes more then 900mb with all the bells and whistles.

I'd say to go for 2, 1Gb sticks, then get 2 more later on.

The 2GB density sticks are not very good, practical, or economical yet.

[mikep7779]

Originally Posted by Shell

I have 2Gb of RAM and Vista never consumes more then 900mb with all the bells and whistles.

I'd say to go for 2, 1Gb sticks, then get 2 more later on.

The 2GB density sticks are not very good, practical, or economical yet.

I agree

[MadMan007]

Originally Posted by Shell

I have 2Gb of RAM and Vista never consumes more then 900mb with all the bells and whistles.

wow that's a ton of memory. By bells and whistles do you mean like eeeeverything that loads on a fresh new install, the equivalents to the junk we normally turn off in XP? Or does the Aero desktop use a lot itself.

[freakdiablo]

900mb???? if winXP ever uses more then 300 megs for me, I begin to panic.

[SeasonalEclipse]

Wow.. Thats.. a lot of ram.. If I used vista on my gaming rig my page file would need to be HUGEEEE

[meionm]

Originally Posted by SeasonalEclipse

Wow.. Thats.. a lot of ram.. If I used vista on my gaming rig my page file would need to be HUGEEEE

If you used vista for gaming then it would slower than xp. I ran 3dmark 06 vista got about 600 points less than xp with same settings. Also Vista runs large number of processes, Xp has like 30 and Vista has like 50

[Shell]

Originally Posted by MadMan007

wow that's a ton of memory. By bells and whistles do you mean like eeeeverything that loads on a fresh new install, the equivalents to the junk we normally turn off in XP? Or does the Aero desktop use a lot itself.

With EVERYTHING that Vista Ultimate has, including Windows defender scanning, stock and news tickers, system monitors, advanced ATi CATALYST, Folding@Home, AERO style set to maximum quality, and all of the regular system files. I'm currently running at 698mb of RAM usage. It takes up as much as 900mb with advanced networking features, drive emulating, and media encoding running in the background.

The amazing thing is the fact that Vista only takes up 200mb when I'm playing games, the OS automatically disables every service that is not needed while gaming to free up as much RAM as needed. A very useful feature that'll keep you from haveing to buy 4Gb of RAM.

The core management is also very good, CPU load is spread very well and is managed properly. When I play a CPU demanding game that's not multi-threaded, only the game will have it's affinity on a single core.

For such a huge os, it's well managed. And if you don't have enough RAM, welcome to hell. No HDD on this planet will go fast enough for Vista's pagefile to allow you to do a lot lagg-free.

Vista does suck for benchmarking, my scores are all lower, but my FPS in Oblivion is the exact same as in XP x64... and a little smoother.